A Linguistic 'Time-Capsule': The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) resource amalgamated and future-proofed two discrete sets of spoken data including recordings from people born within the Tyneside conurbation between 1890 and 1970. The overarching aim was to improve access to and promote the re-use of NECTE by producing an electronic public database resource in a variety of aligned formats which can be accessed according to user need via a gatekeeping system so as to fully comply with the Data Protection Act. This electronic archive is a record of the regional identity of this distinctive conurbation. As such, it has research implications for historians as well as cultural theorists. We also envisage it being exploited by various sub-disciplines of linguistics and English Language both within and outwith the AHRB’s remit.

Project

Academic field
English Language and Literature
Linguistics
Affiliation
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Project link
A Linguistic 'Time-Capsule': The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English
Funders
Arts and Humanities Research Board/Council (AHRB/AHRC)

Collaboration

Contact person
Karen Corrigan

arts-humanities.net

Principal investigator
Prof. Karen Corrigan
Principal project staff
Prof. Karen Corrigan
Start date
Monday, October 1, 2001
Completion date
Friday, April 1, 2005
Era
Modern
Place
England
Digital resources created
The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English amalgamated two separate corpora of recorded speech collected from local people on Tyneside in the UK. The corpus has been enhanced to include digitized sound, phonetic transcription, standard orthographic transcription, and grammatical markup, all of which are aligned. The data consists of conversations which deal with local pastimes, employment opportunities, aspirations and attitudes as well as discussions of cultural and social life.
Source material
The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) project future-proofed and improved access to two separate corpora of recorded speech, one collected in the late 1960’s as part of the SSRC-funded 'Tyneside Linguistic Survey' (TLS) (Strang 1968), and the other in 1994 for the ESRC-funded 'Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken British English' (PVC) project (Milroy et al.1997). The TLS project originally intended to create 100 reel-to-reel audiotaped, loosely-structured 30-minute interviews with informants drawn from a stratified random sample of Gateshead in North-East England. The PVC corpus was collected in the same region using high quality audio tape-recorders/microphones and was originally in the form of 20 DAT tapes, each of which averages 60 minutes in length. The informants in this case were recorded in dyads of relatives or friends and the fieldworker has a less important role. In both corpora the informants are divided between various social class groupings of male and female speakers and represent young, middle and old age-cohorts. Both original sources are held in the Catherine Cookson Archive of Tyneside and Northumbrian Dialect at the University of Newcastle. Although it was possible to digitize the PVC corpus in its entirety, the TLS materials proved to be more problematic and only 40 full data-sets have been transferred into electronic format to create the NECTE corpus.
Data formats
Extensible Markup Language (XML) TEI-compliant
Metadata standards
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Publications

•Date Unknown: Hero (Higher Education & Research Opportunities in the UK), ‘Why no one nools a Geordie’.

•Friday, April 6th 2001: The Guardian ‘Geordie dialect gannin out of fashion’. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4166147,00.html

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Journal ‘Geordie dialect gets a high survival rating’.

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Sun ‘Migrants boosting dialects’.

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: Daily Mail ‘Geordie’s on the way out, bonny lad’ (Robin Yap, Science reporter).

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Times ‘New dialects fast replacing native oldies’ (Robin Young).

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: BBC News, UK Edition ‘Migration ‘creating’ new dialects’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3585231.stm

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Daily Telegraph ‘Globalisation ‘creating dialects that replace regional accents’’(Paul Stokes).

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: North County Times (The Californian) ‘Language more dynamic than ever’ (by Associated Press). www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/01/special_reports/science_technology/3_31_0421_51_52.txt

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ‘British dialects proliferating’ (Sue Leeman, Associated Press). www.ajc.com/news/content/news/ap/ap_story.html/Intl/AP.V5578.AP-Britain-Dynamic.html

•Monday, April 5th: The Times of India ‘Come, kiss my chuddies’ (Rashmee Z. Ahmed). http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/598807.cms

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Guardian ‘Dialect explosion signals decline of BBC English’ (Martin Wainwright).

•Thursday, April 1st 2004: The Independent ‘Linguists get chuddies in twist over dialects’ (Terry Kirby, Chief reporter).

•Allen, W., Beal, J.C., Corrigan, Karen P., Moisl, H. and Maguire, W. (2007) ‘The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English’, in Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H. (eds.) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 2, Diachronic Databases pp.16-48. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

•Beal, J.C. (2004) ‘Geordie Nation: Language and Identity in the North-East of England’‚ Lore and Language, 17: 33-48.

•Beal, J. and Corrigan, K.P. (2002) ‘Relativisation in Tyneside and Northumbria’, in Poussa, P. (ed.) Dialect Contact and History on the North Sea Littoral, 125-134. Lincom Europa.

•Beal, J.C. and Corrigan, Karen P. (2005a) ‘No, Nay, Never: Negation in Tyneside English’, in Iyeiri, Y. (ed.) Aspects of English Negation, pp.139-156. Tokyo: Yushodo Press and Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

•Beal, J.C. and Corrigan, Karen P. (2005b) ‘A tale of two dialects: Relativization in Newcastle and Sheffield’, in Filppula, M., Klemola, J., Palander, M. and Penttilä, E. (eds.) Dialects Across Borders: Selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI),Joensuu, August 2002, pp.211-229. CILT, 273. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

•Beal, J.C. and Corrigan, Karen P. (2007) ‘ ‘Time and Tyne’: A corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization stategies in Tyneside English’, in Elspass, S. et al. (eds.) Language History from Below-Linguistic Variation in the Germanic Languages from 1700–2000: Proceedings pp.99-114. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H. (eds.) (2007a) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 1, Synchronic Databases. Houndsmills: Palgrave-Macmillan.

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H. (eds.) (2007b) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 2, Diachronic Databases.Houndsmills: Palgrave-Macmillan.

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, Karen P. and Moisl, H. (2007c) ‘Taming digital voices and texts: models and methods for handling synchronic corpora’ in Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H. (eds.) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 1, Synchronic Databases, pp.1-16. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, Karen P. and Moisl, H. (2007d) ‘Taming digital voices and texts: models and methods for handling diachronic corpora’ in Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H. (eds.) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 1, Diachronic Databases pp.1-15. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, Karen P., Rayson, P. and Smith, N. (2007) ‘Writing the Vernacular: Transcribing and Tagging the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE)’, in Meurman-Solin, A. and Nurmi, A. (eds.) Annotating Variation and Change, Vol.1. .

•Beal, J.C., Corrigan, K.P. and Moisl, H.L. (to appear) 'The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: Annotation Practices and Dissemination Strategies', in Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.) Handbook on Corpus Phonology. Oxford: OUP.

•Corrigan, K.P. (to appear) 'The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: Tracking Phonological Change from the 1900s to the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century', in Terttu Nevalainen, Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Susan Fitzmaurice and Jeremy Smith (eds.) Rethinking Approaches to the History of English. Oxford: OUP.

•Kretzschmar, W., Anderson, J., Beal, J.C., Corrigan, Karen P., Opas-Hänninen, L. and Plichta, B. (2006) ‘Collaboration on corpora for regional and social analysis’ Journal of English Linguistics, 34: 172-205.

•Moisl H.L. (2009a) 'Exploratory Multivariate Analysis'. In: Lüdeling, A; Kytö, M, ed. Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 874-898.

•Moisl H.L. (2009b) 'Using electronic corpora in historical dialectology research: the problem of document length variation', in Dossena, M; Lass, R, (eds.) Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 67-90.

•Moisl H.L. (2009c) 'Using electronic corpora to study language variation: the problem of data sparsity. In: Tsiplakou, S; Karyolemu, M; Pavlou, P, ed. Language Variation: European Perspectives v. 2: Selected Papers Form the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLlaVE 4) 2009. Nicosia: John Benjamins, 2, 169-178.

•Moisl H.L. (2010) 'Variable scaling in cluster analysis of linguistic data'. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2010, 6.

•Moisl, H.L. (to appear) 'Statistical corpus exploitation', in Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.) Handbook on Corpus Phonology.Oxford: OUP.

•Moisl H.L. and Maguire W. (2008) 'Identifying the Main Determinants of Phonetic Variation in the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English'. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 15(1), 46-69.

•Rowe, Charley (2007) ‘He divn’t gan tiv a college ti di that, man! A study of do (and to) in Tyneside English.’ Language Sciences, 29: 360-371.